And a project at the University of Maryland to track radicalization by QAnon found that 83 percent of the women who had committed crimes in the name of the conspiracy theory had children who had been abused by a romantic partner or family member.
The QAnon movement doesn’t draw adherents online the way it once did. But that almost doesn’t matter. The story that always meant the most to the followers was that Mr. Trump was the only one who could save the world from an elite cabal of satanic pedophiles. And that tale has retained every bit of its power as it feeds directly into the Epstein frenzy. (Source: "The Conservative Crusade that's about so Much More than Epstein")
Since I don't know anybody who is or was a Qanon believer, I tended to dismiss the movement as just another symptom of late-modern, cargo-cult, ontological dizziness. Most people don't do well with profoundly disruptive social change. Anything that undermines their fundamental beliefs, disrupts their normal patterns of life, and increases their sense of economic precarity makes them feel that there is no solid place to set their feet as the world spins around them. So they grab onto anything that offers to steady things. Qanon and the Trump cult serve that purpose. I still think that's mostly right, but this article helped me understand a few things better about the people attracted to Qanon and why going after pedophiles is so central to their cause.
So first a little review to set up what I want to say about Epstein and Qanon. For me the primary disrupter in American history, and thus the underlying cause of American ontological dizziness, has been Capitalism in three stages: Industrial Capitalism in the Post Civil War period, Consumer Capitalism in the post-WWII period, and Techno-Capitalism since the 90s. Each phase builds on the one that precedes it to 'advance' our dehumanization. My critique of capitalism certainly includes all the ways that it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, but its most toxic effect is not economic but cultural-spiritual. Yes, capitalism promotes innovation and a certain kind consumer-choice freedom that you would not have found in the Soviet Union, but what capitalism's defenders never seem to understand is that it's just plain dehumanizing.
The Bill Buckleys and the Davids Brooks , French, and Frum never quite grasp this because for them the horrors of state socialism justify the horrors of capitalism. If the alternative to Capitalism is to live in a society that makes shoes that nobody wants to buy, well, duh, end of argument: Capitalism must be defended at all costs. They don’t recognize that both are two sides of the same materialistic coin, that both in their different ways, are equally destructive of the human spirit. They want the innovation and wealth that capitalism brings, but of course not the ontological dizziness its concomitant creative destruction brings. They don't seem to understand that you don't get one without the other.
Look, I want neither an ideological capitalist nor a socialist society. I want a Good Society, and the definition of a good society is one, to quote Peter Maurin, where it is "easier for people to be good". What would it be like if we started thinking about what such a a good society would look like, and then work backwards to create policies and institutions that would support it? Because when I look around me at the way that capitalism has ravaged American society spiritually and culturally, it's clear that any idea of the Good is no longer even a remote consideration.
So it's within this context that I want to address what Jeffrey Epstein 'phenomena' symbolizes. Nothing has been more disruptive to lives of everyday Americans than the seismic changes in American social mores during the the last 150+ years than the disruption of traditional sexual mores has been. I'm talking about this as a socio-cultural-political matter, not as a moral one. Let's just bracket the moral dimension for now.
I have mostly avoided writing about sexual politics over the years for two reasons. First, because insofar as it has been a primary source of the fuel that keeps the culture war burning, I see it as a distraction. It serves the interest of the 1% to have ordinary Americans to fight one another about abortion and gay marriage in the front parlor to keep them distracted while the 1% sneaks in through the back door and steal everything that isn't bolted down. And, second, because while I don't think anybody, perhaps most especially "sexologists", know what they're talking about when it comes to human sexuality, neither do I.
I said above that I've "mostly" avoided writing about sex because I did address it in the second of the Cathedral Lectures where I spoke about Marcuse's 'repressive de-sublimation', and in the third lecture about Freud's Oedipus Complex and Deleuze and Guattari's 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. I'm not going to go through here everything I said there, but Marcuse's repressive de-sublimation provides, for me anyway, a robust explanation about how loosening traditional sexual mores in the post WWII period was part of the broader bread-and-circuses strategy to serve capitalist elite interests by keeping the masses distracted and disorganized. What's better than promiscuous sex, porn, and drugs to keep the wage slaves from revolting?
And my reason for introducing Anti-Oedipus was to make two points: First, its "doctrine" is pervasive in shaping the ethos of America's educated classes whether or not most have read it. Second, despite the authors' intent, which was to undermine the capitalist order by promoting a kind of sexual anarchy, it did the opposite for reasons that Marcuse explained by repressive de-sublimation. Anti-Oedipal sexual anarchy serves, rather than undermines, the interests of the 1%.
So I feel pretty confident in asserting that most of our late modern ideas about human sexuality–and that includes our ideas about abortion–are completely distorted by everything that is deeply wrong about capitalism, especially the way it commodifies sexuality, reduces it to an entertainment, and objectifies humans into things to consume. And I also feel very confident in asserting that our ancestors knew more about sex than we do. They understood the power of Eros to energize a movement toward self-transcendence. We see this in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, the early Church fathers' reading of the Song of Songs. We see it Plotinus and later in the cult of the Virgin and the Religion of Love in the medieval romances, then later in the songs of the troubadors, in Dante, Petrarch, the Platonic Love invented by the Renaissance Neoplatonist Ficino, and that idea through Castiglione channelled to Shakespeare.
And that's just the Western tradition. The East has its own traditions and wisdom concerning the transcendent power of Eros. We are utter sexual morons compared to them. I include myself among the morons, but I know enough to know that I don't know, and that they did. And so almost everything that I hear my contemporaries say about sex, whether it's in a book by a sexologist, or on the op-ed page of the NY times, is mostly wrong because none has real wisdom–they're just spewing formulaic banalities.
But neither do I have wisdom, so all I can do is point to those who did, and hope that some of that wisdom can be recovered at some point. In the meanwhile, people of good will need to do the best they can in good conscience to deal with their sexuality in a destroyed cultural landscape that makes us stupid about almost everything truly important. I certainly don't stand in judgment about anybody's choices, but if we think we are more advanced or evolved in our ideas about sexuality than our ancestors, it's because we are so ignorant.
But back to Qanon. Is there anything more appallingly dehumanizing than the sexual molestation of children? But we're living in a culture world shaped by Anti-Oedipus, where every taboo is seen as an arbitrary social construction, and so it follows in a culture that celebrates a middle-school level of moral maturity that the cool kids test the limits. What is the next taboo to be transgressed? Why not pedophilia? In a world where humans are in almost every aspect of their lives treated as commodities to be consumed, used, and exploited, why should we exclude children? It wasn't a problem during the Industrial Capitalist era; why should it be one during the Techno-Capitalist era? Why should children be treated any differently than any other human "resource"? Because they're innocent? Aww–you're a real sentimentalist, aren't you? No, they're just meat like everyone else.
So here's what seems at least a little bit clearer to me about why this Epstein business is so galvanizing for so many everyday Americans. Pedophilia is where everyday Americans draw the line. In a world where every traditional taboo is being transgressed with the tacit consent if not outright approval of the culture's elite, this is the one whose transgression will not be tolerated. This is where they take their stand.
But wait, you might be asking: If it's their own family members who are doing this, why are they blaming elites? Haven't these drunken yahoos been molesting their kids from time immemorial? Isn't there a lot of guilt projection going on here? Yes, but when they sober up, at least they have enough human decency to start drinking again to forget the horror of what they've done. The elites don't even have enough humanity to feel guilty about their sins because they don't believe there's such a thing as sin. They don't slip into drunken temptation, but are cold-blooded organizers of sex rings and orgies. Epstein and Maxwell are proof that this kind of thing is what elites do, and it's not unreasonable to think that this kind of behavior is far more widespread, and that they're just the unlucky ones that got caught.
But still, aren't most educated elites just as appalled at child molestation as non-elites? Most are, of course. But from the pov of non-elites, it's not their friends and relatives that have disrupted the traditional order that gave their lives structure and meaning and that taught them right from wrong. They blame the nihilistic cultural and economic elites, and in that they're not wrong.
So the irony of ironies is that Qanon et al have looked to Trump, the Alpha predator, to bring his fellow predators to justice. Their naiveté and credulity is truly astonishing, but there it is. And yet after having forgiven him for so much worse, how rich would it be if this were the issue that finally led to his downfall? Unlikely but not impossible. I could see the little hyenas Trump surrounds himself with turn on the Alpha if they see him weakened enough. The religious reactionaries would much prefer Vance over Trump, and it's not impossible to imagine their calling for another impeachment with the MTG faction joining the Dems to put Vance in the Oval.
Ok–that's a long, long, long shot. But at some point, one way or another, sooner or later, the zeitgeist of late capitalism will spit Trump out and leave him flopping about like a fish on the beach. He's just a cypher, an empty vessel that carries within him everything that is malignant and dehumanizing about late capitalism. But he's done his job, and we'll never be the same again.
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